Good morning and welcome to episode 99 of Effectively Wild, the baseball

perspective daily podcast. In New York, I am Ben Lindbergh and in Long Beach

California in the Honda Fit. Joining me is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hello, Ben.

Yesterday we discussed a major offseason move and today we are also discussing a major

offseason move, not the same one, a different one. This time we're going to talk about the

race and royals trade that happened, I guess on Sunday night, right before we talked about the

cranky trade. We've now had a day to digest this and to read the many articles written on both

sides of the debate and coming down on either side, some people staunchly defending the royals'

decision, others thinking that the race wiped the floor with the royals. There is a pretty wide

range of opinions here, so I guess we will try to make sense of why that is and talk about some

of the outstanding issues here. Is there any particular place where you want to start? I have a

few kind of questions, but I don't know where to dive in exactly. Well, I mean, I don't either, so...

I guess there's one perspective, I guess, which is... So maybe we should just start by saying whether we

think it's a good trade for the royals or not. All right, we should probably say what the trade

is just in case. It's James Shields and Wade Davis. We'll go to the royals and Will Myers,

top prospect Will Myers, and three other prospects of varying levels will be going to the race.

And Shields is signed for two more years at, I believe, $21 million or so dollars, and Davis has a

long extension that he signed that takes him theoretically through 2017. Yeah, and the last year

that deal, I think, is 10 million. And it starts it around two and a half or something next year.

It's good that we did that because we talked about Koji Oihara for an entire episode last week

and didn't mention why we were talking about him until the last 30 seconds, which someone pointed

out. So now we have established why we are talking about this topic. So I guess, I mean, my initial

...